The worldwide network of computers commonly known as the “Internet” has grown tremendously since the creation of a subset known as the “World Wide Web” (WWW or Web), popularized in 1993. The emergence of the Web, and its accompanying standards enabled users to move beyond traditional on-line data exposure, which required knowledge of protocols and other low-level computer constructs, to a much more filtered and full-featured interface in the form of a “Web Browser.” The Web Browser filters out the computer constructs, displaying only pertinent content, such as text, images, animations and sounds, while hiding from the user the computer codes that are used to negotiate access, generate and display this content.
Some of the standards popularized by the web are Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). HTTP allows HTML documents, which carry many forms of information, from text and images, to audio and video, to be easily found via a URL from a collection of networks known as the Internet. These networks have public and private files which are accessed via routing tables. The routing tables reside on Domain Name Servers (DNS) and are regularly updated.
Two innovations provided by the Browser environment, HTTP and the Internet are: specialized display of data (certain text and graphics) and “Hyperlinks” which appear as “clickable-buttons” or “links” made of text or graphics in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) presented by the Browser. These links contain an address for another location on the Internet. Instead of seeing computer language full of telecommunications protocols and an occasional listing of a graphic file's name, the user sees only human pertinent text and an automatically displayed image within this text. The user is shown graphical or textual links to facilitate navigation instead of having to properly enter complex path names.
This combination of features, coupled with the ease of use that HTML provides as a page publishing format, have proved to be very popular, leading to a mass adoption of this new medium by many constituencies. These include education, most areas of business (publishing, finance, commerce, entertainment, etc.) and government. Given the increasing adoption of the Web, many non-technically oriented users use this new medium to go from page to page, shifting from one computer network to the next simply by making decisions on which links to click. Search engines which index the Web allow these users to quickly locate URLs and their associated links. In addition, content aggregators collect and publish collections of Web pages. In just a few years, the Web has evolved from static pages to pages containing animation, personalized data, commerce-level security and streaming audio and video. A more recent innovation is the “Push Technology” model which is found in the more recently released browsers.
Push technology, pioneered by Pointcast™, has been adopted by Netscape™ and Microsoft™, the two browser giants, as the next way to connect viewers with content. As implemented by Pointcast, push technology began in 1996 as a personalized data gathering service. Users select content sources from a list and the Pointcast service automatically provides updated information which is displayed by the user's screen saver in a uniform format. Information providers who send information to users using the Pointcast system must first format their information according to requirements set by Pointcast. Thus, the “pages” of information displayed by the Pointcast screen saver are specially prepared screens. A user of the Pointcast system can access information only from those sources which have prepared information in the Pointcast format.
By collecting user interest profiles, the current “4.x” level browsers can constantly update a specific set of topics, from news, sports and weather, to financial and entertainment content. Thus, push technology enables information to come to the user instead of requiring the user to seek out the information. This not only facilitates a new distribution method for publishers and advertisers, but it also fosters new community models and demographics to go with them. As web browsing has evolved it has changed from a mere novelty, to a relied upon conduit of information flow.
Recently, problems with access to a major on-line service provider produced lawsuits stemming from lack of access to mission-critical information, in both receipt and transmission. As this technology has moved from budding curiosity browsing to true reliance, the blossoming of the technology has yet to show what mature fruit it will provide. Commerce is a large part of the development of the medium as companies like Cisco and Boeing conduct exclusive web-based sales in excess of one billion dollars. In addition, consumer and small business oriented vendors such as Dell have sales in excess of $1 million per day via their website. But what other services, beyond a catalog of information and products, will the Internet and its Web offer? The subject invention proposes a next-level of functionality that may provide an insight.